It was a snowy and shortened work week for a lot of people in North Carolina, but unfortunately, that didn’t prevent some of the folks on Right-Wing Avenue from finding and trumpeting their inner hypocrite/demagogue.
Tillis hypocrisy alert
Take U.S. Senator Thom Tillis, for example...

Mounting student debt is a nagging problem for most families these days. As the cost of higher education rises, borrowing to cover those costs often becomes a family concern across multiple generations including the student, parents, and even grandparents or other relatives.

Latest racist attacks on immigrants could be an important tipping point
As bleak as our national political landscape may seem right now, it’s worth remembering that it is far from the only time in American history in which a dangerous, dishonest and delusional con artist has held a position of great prominence. In the early 1950’s, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin rode his paranoid and dishonest witch hunt against supposed “communist subversion” to become one of the most famous and powerful men in the nation.

Grand constitutional questions in this country aren’t settled until the Supreme Court has its say, either by affirming or reversing the rulings of lower-court judges or simply by declining to hear challenges to those rulings.
So it’s too early to conclude definitively that North Carolina’s Republican-controlled General Assembly has set a sorry standard leading to a national crackdown on over-the-top partisan gerrymandering of election districts.

This past week has been a good one for the state of Alabama. Not only did the Crimson Tide football team defeat their neighbors from Georgia in the national college football championship game; Alabama political leaders defeated their peers from North Carolina in the competition for the latest big auto plant.
Happily, unlike the case with the Georgia gridiron defeat, there’s still some good news for North Carolina amidst the disappointment.

Conservative North Carolina lawmakers have pushed through a lot of radical laws and legislative proposals to dramatically remake our state in recent years. From suppressing the vote to gerrymandering legislative districts to privatizing our public schools to discriminating against LGBT citizens to altering the balance of power between the executive and legislative branches: the list is a long and troubling one.

Conservative happy talk doesn’t change several important basics
The mantra from conservative North Carolina politicians and pundits these days is that North Carolina’s hard right policy turn of recent years somehow provides “a model for the nation.” If you spend any time on policy-oriented social media, you can hardly refresh your browser without being pummeled by the claim that North Carolina’s economic outlook is amazingly bright and that it’s all the result of conservative decisions to slash taxes and “get the state’s fiscal house in order.”

Why attempting to appease conservative fundamentalists is not the answer
These are tough times for American progressives. The President of the United States is a serial falsifier and an inveterate champion of the worst kind of predatory plutocracy. Meanwhile, the congressional majority that fuels and sustains much of his power and influence is, in turn, undergirded by an unholy alliance of robber barons, nativists and theocrats that rejects the very idea of a modern, plural democracy. Add to this toxic tableau an overlay of bitter, sometimes violent, racism and the hard reality of an economy starkly and increasingly divided between haves and have nots, and the picture gets that much darker.

Well, another year has almost come and gone and the season of celebration and gift giving is well underway. What better time than this to construct a holiday gift wish list for some of North Carolina’s most prominent and hard-to-please politicos and pontificators?
Here, therefore is our 2017 list. On the odd chance that some of these are actually fulfilled, it seems at least possible that 2018 will be a better and gentler year for all of us. Here’s to it.

The ten years since the start of the Great Recession have done little to address the fundamental economic problems facing North Carolina. The worst of the recession may have passed, but many barriers to economic opportunity and security remain.
This report documents the persistence of long-standing economic inequalities (particularly along racial lines), a deepening divide between wealthy investors and everyone else, a lack of robust job growth overall, and the continued concentration of economic opportunity in a few metropolitan areas. None of these pathologies are natural, but rather the lack of adequate policy response, and their continued existence demands real solutions.